"Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms
abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home.
Indignantly the author of _Hervé Riel_ asks why "the more than all
magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods
untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth
has no pride above her pride in that same

"race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful--
Whose very falterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow."

_The Ring and the Book_ had made Browning famous. But fame was far from
tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public;
rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his
own way with a more complete security and unconcern.
_Hohenstiel-Schwangau_--one of the rockiest and least attractive of all
Browning's poems--had mystified most of its readers and been little
relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was
followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a
defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III.
came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue
from Molière's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife
in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly
(in Browning's happy paraphrase),--

"Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court
To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord